Experiences, tips and trick for (Splinterlands) bloggers after posting each day for a month

It is done. I did a quality post a day challenge in the month of January. Here are my experiences and a few tips and tricks.

I highlight sometimes "quality post", because sharing one of your battles a day with minimal text, daily rewards or a daily contest takes much less effort and preparation

The topics we will look into are:

• Pros and Cons of a post a day challenge
• How to start
• Picture editing - What to know
• Challenges
• Final words

Pros and Cons of "A post a day challenge"

Pros:

• Deep dive - Deeper understanding of the topics you post about
• Will it be good? - There is a great feeling of excitement after a post is published
  and you wait for the communities reaction
• Recognition - Acclaimed posts make for a good day, seeing big names of the community appreciating your work feels awesome!
• Financial recognition - Upvotes, rewards and all those tipping tokens just improves your day
• Learning and developing new skills - A good blogger wants to improve their content and visuals, best way to do it is by practicing
• Achievement - You proved you can do it

Cons:

• Time consuming - 1-3 hours is needed for quality posts
• Takes away focus - Often I was thinking about possible topics during the day. I was a bit stressed out when I had no meaningful ideas, but at the end of the day something always came up.
• Fleeting feelings of success - Half of the posts gets looked over or are not interesting to the community. It is hard to bring every day interesting topics on the table when 2-3 posts in the row get ignored. Don't stop keep it up :)
• Recognition takes time - I'm posting for over 3 months, but even when I started this challenge the posts from the first weeks were rewarded from challenges and not through a good audience. I still have posts which gain small rewards.

How to start

To think of something to write about each day is a hard task. Let's dive a bit deeper in the topic.

Choose a topic you are familiar with

You won't have the time to do a research each day if you have daily tasks like school, work or taking care of your family. So you should be familiar with multiple aspect of the topic you chose.

In the context of Splinterlands you could have post about:

• Best strategies
• Value from game related crypto coins like DEC/SPS, to assets like cards or land
• Game modes and improvement ideas for Ranked games, Tournaments or Brawls
• Future of the game
• Topics about the lore or write fanfiction
• Create art
• Support others with guides and tips
• Support projects of other Hiveans (share great posts or graphics...)
  ... or anything else that comes to your mind.

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Preparation

To have a smooth start into "a day a post challenge" some preparations will make your month much easier. Here are a few tips:

• Be part of the community : Read posts about Splinterlands like on splintertalk.io, peakd.com or 1up.zone. Also join the Splinterlands discord and other discords, read reddit, check for groups on telegram, twitter, what streamers on 3speak or youtube.
• Connect : Look out for people with similar interests and start a conversation. I have reached out to a few people who are posting and providing great content and everyone was very friendly and helpful!
• Work on the looks : Learn the basic formatting commands (here is a blogpost formatting guide) and the basics of photo editing - see a few tips further below.
• Have a clear post structure : My posts are usually longer, so I prefer to have a short introduction what I talk about and why. Then it follows up with a table of content, so people can jump to the part they are interested in. At the end of each section I use dividers. The before last section contains a few positive words or a summarization of the post. And the last section is about recognition to the resource providers and a clearly stated promotion of my Splinterlands account and affiliate program option.
• Stock up on raw pictures : Find a site with free to use stock pictures for your thumbnails and blog posts
• Have repeating post - Have a few topics you can write about easily and takes you less time, but you still believe they have value. One of my post is a market watch post. As each week the market changes it gives me new things to write about.
• Prepare templates : Create templates so you don't have to copy paste the same content from older posts. This is great with the previous point. For example peakd.com has a feature to create and use templates. I use it regularly. You can find it here in the upper right corner :
  
• Learn about tags - Tags are the alpha and omega to get your topics before your audience. The hive blogosphere has a lot of automatization, this is done by tags. The hive blogosphere is also divided into multiple interest groups (so called tribes), like the above mentioned splintertalk.io (all about Splinterlands) or 1up.zone (Crypto gaming), but there are others, which focus on different topics. One of the most well known is leofinance.io, which looks into anything market and finance related. Most if not all of these tribes have their own tags they search for. So if you put the tag oneup into your Topics-Tag field, then your post will be seen in the oneup community etc.
  Make sure to use correct tags. If you use an incorrect tag, then your post might get downvoted by the community, where it does not belong in.

And now write!

Picture editing - What to know

To create a basic thumbnail for your post you should have a background picture. If it is very simple then you might need a foreground picture as well. Search for pictures which have an opaque background (so they look like they are cut out, and look good on any background) and the font type and size for your posts.
For Splinterlands post I would advice to use the post from the game itself. You can go into the monster cards, go to the Lore tab and use the picture there! ;)

You will need to know these basic skills:

• How do layers work - it is helpful when the background picture, the foreground picture and the text are on different layers. In this case you can manipulate them separately and don't have to restart the editing process when you make a find out at a later stage that you need to move the text around (I'm looking at me 3 weeks ago, when MS Paint was enough to do the graphics...)
• Resizing and moving images - to get them in the form factor you need, like thumbnails should be the aspect ratio 16:9 (i.e. 800 pixel width and 450 pixel height).
• Adding text and editing it - You should find out also the font type and size you prefer.

In the future you could also look into the opacity of layers, magic selections and gradients.

If you need a better overview, then let me know and I will create a post on how I create thumbnails in Krita

Challenges

On the hive blockchain you might find challenges, which can guarantee you to earn a bit for your posts. This is a good incentive to work on the posts, as it gives you a small revenue each week. Look out for them or ask others for advice :)

In the Splinterlands community there are 3 weekly challenges to look out for:

• Weekly Battle Challenge
• Weekly Social Media Challenge
• Splinterlands Art Contest

All these challenges are announces at : https://www.splintertalk.io/@splinterlands/

If you browse the posts you might also find additional challenges. In the 1 month I was writing posts there was a challenge to guess the value of the one of a kind gold foil Mighty Dricken. It was fun to guestimate challenge and even though I entered late I received recognition and 2000 DEC from the organizer. Here is the original challenge: https://hive.blog/splinterlands/@goldmatters/appraise-the-rarest-asset-in-splinterlands-for-a-chance-to-win-25000-dec

One important note about the upvote sums listed below your posts. The sum is paid out after 7 days. 50% goes to the author (you) and 50% goes to the curators (the people who upvoted you).

Final words

This was a great experience. I think blogging gives me a daily attention, which I got very easily addicted to and now it is part of my life. One of the main reasons I do it is to share my knowledge, and to help others getting started easier. Your upvotes, feedback and comments mean a lot to me. Thank you for your support!

My post is far from complete. So feel free to leave also some tips for others in the comments. I will upvote them and leave a PIZZA for you as well :)

I hope this overview helps you in your journey as well.
See you on Hive!

Dividers are from kaliphae : https://peakd.com/hive-118554/@kaliphae/kaliphe-dividers-gold-series-for-hive-stock-images

If you would like to start playing Splinterlands, then feel free to reach out to me here, or on the Splinterlands Discord channel:
When you decide to buy a Spellbook, then please consider using my referral code : arkasz
Let me know that you used it, and I will send you some DEC and delegate a few cards so you can start your journey ;)